'Petition for impeachment of CJI should have been avoided', says Cong leader Ashwani Kumar

Congress leader Ashwani Kumar on Friday has expressed his objection to the impeachment motion while refusing to pass any comment on the circumstances that led to it, namely the dismissal of the PIL seeking a special investigation into the death of judge of Judge BH Loya.

Kumar said, ''Would not like to get into the merits of the controversy, I am on a larger principle & the larger principle is that impeachment is the extreme remedy & that too against the chief justice, which is an unprecedented move. This move could have been avoided.''

''If I would have been a member of parliament and had I been given this paper to sign, I would not have signed the impeachment motion,'' said Kumar, a noted lawyer who served as Union Law Minister in the previous UPA government.

Kumar is not the only leader within the Congress ranks to express disagreement with the party's extreme move. Among the senior Congress leaders whose signatures were not on the petition for the removal of the Chief Justice of India were former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and former Union Ministers P Chidambaram and Salman Khurshid. Chidambaram and Khurshid are prominent lawyers.